They're just a painfully, painfully reductive take on social phenomena?
Would it help if they were called "brainworms"?
I think Stirner was emphasizing the external origin of thoughtlessly followed ideologies, to argue that the only authentic beliefs are what you've constructed and understood yourself, not inherited from obligation, tradition, or as a compromise.
Yeah fair, if that's your read on Stirner. On that level I have friendlier disagreement: as much as I think it is healthy for everyone's epistemology to have a good punky resistance to those sorts of ideologies, I also think knowledge construction is very much a social process. On what basis can you evaluate ideological influences from outside? If you have some sort of rubric or metric true to yourself that you built in your own head, how do you know that you haven't just founded it on values handed down to you in your childhood and youth? You're never going to reach some sort of islanded ideal where you become a true unmoved mover so to speak.
That's all very interesting, but my main gripe is the Stirner fans and how they use "spook" I guess, which is a very different discussion lol.
I basically agree, there's no way to fully divorce yourself from environmental circumstances, so beyond having "a good punky resistance" and reading widely, being human is fundamentally social and building society from the individual upwards feels backwards. I respect egoist anarchism, but in the way that I think it's a way to exist socially, not as a way to build all anarchism.
Epistemology is about reducing something down to what we can know. Identifying the building blocks of knowledge if you will. It follows the guideline of Occam's razor that the simplest explanation is probably the best. Calling it reductionist is missing the point. Reductionism isn't a bad thing necessarily.
I like some kinds of reductionism, so I used the qualifier "painful". I just don't see the use in the idea - where it adds any information to our understanding, or makes any novel categorization or classification, or even just as a fun concept to toy around with. That's probably my own shortcoming, but also maybe there's a reason Stirner isn't taken very seriously in academia.
Philosophy is the most fun you can have being frustrated and I wish it was easier to have discussions about it over message boards.
Agree. Same with "ops"
I'm not saying this stuff doesn't happen, but not every bad thing that happens is not pre ordained. When it comes to the government, I've always fell back on the quote "never assume malice where stupidity is just as good of an explanation".
We would all be microchipped and marching to the Amazon warehouse for our job assignment if capitalism and the government were actually organized. They work together, sure. But it comes from a place of greed and self interest. Greedy people can never work together on a giant scale because factions would constantly be breaking off to try to get a bigger piece of the pie. We see it happen all the time.
They're not organized, and they can be turned against each other. That's really our only exploit.